Film Comedy: Men 6, Women 1

Anita Loos prepares to christen Jean Harlow

This goes without saying, but here goes anyway: the list of comedic actresses is a short one if you compare it to comedic actors. Search “movie comedies” and you get lists like 100 Greatest Comedic Actors/ Actresses, which (as of the first draft of this in 2010) included only eight women; or 100 Greatest Comedy Movies, where actors outnumber actresses at least 6 to 1. These are not lists I endorse, by the way; they’re just typical, and in at least one way, better than similar lists because they go back decades. Many lists tend to be skewed toward the present, which is a mixed blessing. On the upside, women are appearing in more and more comedies; on the down, our culture seems to be forgetting past women, favoring flavors of the day like Kristen Wiig over earlier dishes like Joan Blondell. Women made fewer contributions, but fewer doesn’t mean lesser. Consider Anita Loos, who was one of the earliest– possibly the earliest– writer to be put on a payroll in Hollywood, when D. W. Griffith hired her in 1912 as a staff scriptwriter.

Lucy, age 21

If you search that same 100 Greatest Comedic Actors/Actresses today (I’m updating in 2018), it’s gone, replaced by separate lists for men and women, 100 each. Regrettably and predictably, the women’s roster is a rather dubious one. While the top three men are unquestionably comedians (1. Charlie Chaplin, 2. Peter Sellers, 3. Groucho Marx), the top three women include an actress who was in comedies, but was not a comic actress per se (1. Lucille Ball, 2. Carol Burnett, 3. Katharine Hepburn). Including actresses who have happened to star in a few comedies is typical of lists like this, as is the tendency to list women who are still making movies, many of whom are performers who are, or started as, stand-up comics, sitcom actresses, or graduates of skit-comedy on shows like Saturday Night Live and SCTV: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kristen Wiig, Catherine O’Hara, Jane Curtin, etc.

Trading card, 1924

Even back in the silent era, when Loos was writing behind the scenes, the great comedians on screen were named Buster, Charlie, Harold, and Roscoe. In contrast, how many people know the surnames of their female counterparts, Mabel and Constance and Edna? Sound movies arrive, witty dialog arrives, screwball is born, and the silver screen delivers Three Stooges and at least three Marx Brothers against one Carole Lombard.

Judy, mugging with Mickey

Allow me to interrupt myself to point out that this is also true of drama. Movies have sprouted far more brilliant actors than actresses, and for a reason that seems obvious to me, if only because the men also have longer careers: men aren’t required to be glamorous, or young. Ordinary-looking actors like Peter Sellers, Mickey Rooney, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, William Powell, Paul Lukas, Alec Guinness, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Lemmon, Trevor Howard, Gene Hackman, Sean Penn, Gary Oldman, etc., can become leading men.  But a woman has to have the dramatic talents of Meryl Streep or Bette Davis, or the musical talents of Judy Garland or Julie Andrews to become a leading lady who isn’t also an eyeful, and young. An interesting case in point: Lucille Ball, who was a rising star and a good-looker if not a knock-out, left the silver screen for the small screen 1951. She was 40, and had enjoyed a typically brief career as a leading lady– brief but prolific: she was credited in 43 movies in 12 years, between 1936 and 1947, but only a few as the lead. She replaced Fay Wray as Hollywood’s “Queen of the B’s,” meaning B movies.

Gable and Lombard

At least there are dramatic Streeps and musical Garlands. In contrast, there have been so few film comediennes that Carole Lombard, who died in 1942, remains the ne plus ultra. The thin competition among funny leading ladies should make it easy to decide who’s best, or anyway who’s your favorite, but in fact it’s damned hard to dethrone Lombard. She is frequently, perhaps even commonly, cited as the the greatest comedienne America has yet produced. Her death in a plane crash at age 33 was one of Hollywood’s functional martyrdoms (Wallace Reid, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe are others; the jury’s still out on Heath Ledger), especially since it ended her brief storybook marriage to Clark Gable. And martyrs tend to be canonized.

Godfrey girl

I’m on record as an under-appreciator of Lombard. Her only Oscar nomination was for the screwball comedy My Man Godfrey, but I found her character, her performance, and even her hairdo insufferable. And it isn’t screwball comedies that turn me off, though they are an acquired taste as well as a hit-or-miss genre; it was her. There has never been a shortage of versatile top-billed actresses who may not have been comediennes per se, but were at least as good at comedy as Lombard, and they didn’t play the comic roles in her obvious and easy way, as imbecilic, singsong-voiced popinjays. Lombard was no better at drama; in fact, she was a whining whannoyance from start to finish in Made for Each Other.

Harlow and Loy, “Libeled Lady”

As I say, I’m in a tiny minority on this, but I do think that many of Lombard’s contemporaries had greater comic ability than hers, though she was perhaps the only dedicated comedic actress who was also a leading lady. Still, I can’t think of a film she was in (save, perhaps, To Be or Not To Be), that wouldn’t have been at least as good, or better, with one of these actresses, whom I cite with some of their best comedic performances: Claudette Colbert in Palm Beach Story, It’s a Wonderful World, and It Happened One Night (her Oscar, shown above left); Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby and Holiday; Barbara Stanwyck in Ball of Fire and Remember the Night; Jean Arthur in The More the Merrier and Too Many Husbands; Ginger Rogers in Tom, Dick and Harry and The Major and the Minor; Myrna Loy in Love Crazy and Libeled Lady, which also stars Jean Harlow, who had screwball chops of her own, particularly in Dinner at Eight. (Had Harlow not died at 26, she might have won the screwball crown.) I’m tempted to add Margaret Sullavan, who had definite comedic gifts, but she was a stage actress who made only 13 films, and her only comedies, really, are the magnificent The Shop Around the Corner and The Good Fairy. The latter, in spite of its appetizing qualities on paper (Ferenc Molnar story, Preston Sturges screenplay, cast including Herbert Marshall and Frank Morgan), lacks any real spark.

Yet Lombard reigns, so I felt duty bound to give her another chance. I queued up three of her most famous films…

Westerns, staying alive

I have become helplessly intrigued by works of art that enjoy considerable praise at first, only to fall into almost complete obscurity. There are endless examples from literature. The Foxes of Harrow leaps to mind, and A Fan’s Notes and Edwin Mullhouse. Some worthy authors are neglected altogether—Alexander Woollcott, James Agee, Ford Madox Ford, and I’m told Thomas Hardy has fallen by the wayside. And then there are movies, an exceptionally fugacious art form. Movies come and go in a flash, even many that garner award consideration. Why? Were they no good in the first place? What happened? My latest example, The Sheepman, was nominated for a screenwriting Oscar in 1959. But before I tackle it, a bit more about my make-shift category, “Once Acclaimed.”

Theda Bara as Cleopatra, one of her many lost films

Because film is such a commercial art form, the list of once-hailed, now-neglected works is a long one. Consider the mortality rate of silent films: Even before the sound era, silent films were often  destroyed because they were considered too unimportant to merit storage space, and that’s on top of the problems of film stock that not only degraded but was flammable. Inevitably, black-and-white films suffered when color arrived in the 1930s, though it took a while. Gone with the Wind was the first color film to win the Oscar for Best Picture in 1939. In the field of 10 nominees, all were black-and-white except it and the Oz part of The Wizard of Oz. Black-and-white photography was still huge throughout the ’30s and 40s. It seems that b&w was the preferred format for dramatic films, and for the genres that flourished in the 1930os—gangster films, biopics, social dramas, newspaper-reporting films, horror, war films. And perhaps especially, comedies. No doubt that was, in large part, because b&w was so much cheaper, and it was what cinematographers knew. Color was for epics like GWTW and musicals In fact, it would be 12 years before another color film won, An American in Paris—which brings us to musicals…

Duck Soup quartet

Musicals poured out of studios during the early sound era in the 1930s. More than 100 were released in 1930. They were called talkies, but there was a hell of a lot of singing. In fact, the first big talkie was a musical, The Jazz Singer. The production of musicals lasted decades, and was popular enough to produce novelties such as Esther Williams’ “aquamusicals” and (dare I call them?) icicles with gold-medal skater Sonja Henie. Revues were popuar, too, from Paramount on Parade (1930), to Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld (1936), to every Marx Brothers movie I can think of. There was a kind of heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, with An American in Paris, Gigi, My Fair Lady, West Side Story, and The Sound of Music. But musicals had all but faded completely by the 70s. Only 10 musicals have won Oscars for best picture, and there was a 34-year gap between the 9th (Oliver! in 1968) and the 10th (Chicago in 2002).

Dances with Wolves: Oscar winner, and top-grossing Western to date

Westerns had a long heyday. They’d been a staple since The Great Train Robbery (1903), and defined the careers of a clutch of major filmmakers from John Ford to Sergio Leone, John Wayne to Clint Eastwood. In recent decades, though, they have dwindled to the occasional triumph, such as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves and Eastwood’s Unforgiven, both of which, rather interestingly, won Oscars, and also happen to be auteur products, with the auteur as the principal actor. It seems that Westerns have reached the stage of veneration. Except, of course, for lowbrow box office fodder like Shanghai Knights and Wild Wild West.

“This time I’m going to try to hit HIM.”

The Sheepman is a case in point—a praised and praiseworthy Western, now almost forgotten. One of Glenn Ford’s many oaters (as Variety calls the genre), it is also a comedy, and a good one. Ford makes the most of the waggish dialog with his signature droll delivery and leisurely pace, and his role as Jason Sweet  is a (sorry) sweet one. Unpredictable at every turn, Sweet is like a chess master playfully manipulating local cowboys and townsfolk. He is crafty, resourceful, and amiable, as well as tough. He is also, of course, this being a Hollywood Western, the fastest gun in the territory. (Speaking of territory, The Sheepman is worth seeing just for the location footage in the glorious aspen-filled valleys of Colorado’s San Juan range.)

The story is also a Hollywood standard, and a good one…

Billy’s big mistake pays off

Billy brings it

Worse movies have earned more than the five Oscars won by The Apartment in 1960—far worse, in fact, and at least three times at the expense of Billy Wilder’s own work. Just the year before, in 1959, Ben Hur won 11 for Christ’s sake (literally), trouncing one of Wilder’s true masterpieces, Some Like It Hot, which, as of this writing, was named the No. 1 comedy of all time by the American Film Institute. In 1955, the dismal remake of a TV drama, Marty won 4, beating out another Wilder gem, The Seven-Year Itch. Earlier, in 1944, Going My Way won 7, and that was the year Wilder made the film noir classic, Double Indemnity. He’d already won three Oscars, one for directing (Lost Weekend), and two for writing (Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard), and he won three more with The Apartment—Best Director, Best Writing, and Best Picture. But it is far from Wilder’s best picture. It isn’t even very good, though it has the strengths that tend to arise when professional artists put their backs into proven formulas. Take a close look at the film, though, and you see his (or Hollywood’s?) cynicism is writ large. I would go so far as to compare The Apartment to Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which has achieved such an iconic status in America that criticizing it seems like an act of sedition. The Apartment differs be being a comedy, but both movies serve up stereotypes with sentimental sauce. Criticism was mixed, as was audience response, but the Academy gave it 10 nominations, and it won five awards (including editing and set design).

Whole lotta gropin’ goin’ on at the office party

The film does have the veneer of reality, even of social commentary. It’s 1959 in New York City, a 9-to-5 world where offices are vast spaces with fluorescent-lit rows of desks (this is pre-cubicle) and everyone dresses alike. It is an era when both individuality and old-fashioned morality seemed to be hanging by a thread. But the movie’s observations, such as they are, are little more than a slyly prurient view of mid-century corporate America, the shallow version because this is a seriocomic movie: the dialog is amusing, the action is not. It has, as I said, the veneer of reality. In real life, do men and women have office dalliances? Yes. Were most working men married? Yes. Were most working women unmarried and younger? Yes. But in this movie all the men and women who work at Consolidated Life Insurance fit that formula, and all of them appear to dally. Like their desks, they’re identical. .

Bud primped for his promotion

The exception is C. C. “Bud” Baxter (Jack Lemmon in a finely balanced seriocomic performance). Bud has been given an individual character— which is not to say admirable. He is smitten with Fran Kubelik (Shirley MacLaine, also in fine form), an elevator operator at the company. He courts her rather clumsily, only to discover that she’s having an affair with his married boss, Mr. Sheldrake (Fred MacMurray, who is given little to do here, certainly compared to his work for Wilder in Double Indemnity). Jeff Sheldrake is quite the construct. Married, with a home in White Plains, two children and a dog, he’s a serial philanderer inside the company. Indeed, under his leadership, it’s practically office policy to screw the female employees. And of all the divisions that exist in any large company, Wilder and his screen-writing collaborator I. A. L. “Iz” Diamond, choose to make him the director of personnel. What qualifications, one wonders, does Jeff Sheldrake look for in the budding secretaries who hand over their vitae? Four of his colleagues also skin dive in the secretarial pool, every one of them an uncomplicated, aging, leering lothario with no depth of feeling, unless being amused by sexual predation can be considered an emotion.

Harvey Weinstein in quadruplicate, ca. 1960

This is the fatally flawed core idea of the entire film. All five men (MacMurray, Ray Walston,  David White, Willard Waterman, and as the quotable Kirkeby, David Lewis) implausibly expose themselves as cads and philanderers in the workplace. They use Bud’s apartment for assignations with their– but let’s let the dialog provide the noun: “Why do all you dames have to live in the Bronx?” asks Kirkeby. The whole idea is preposterous, and risible in the wrong way: laughable as opposed to amusing. No executives— let alone five of them at one company— flaunt their disreputable behavior to an underling because they need to borrow his apartment for their affairs. That’s what hotels and cash are for.

X-rated Xmas

Which brings us to the fellow who pays the rent, Bud. He’s cheerful and rather charming, with a spring in his step and a ready smile. We’re supposed to like him, but he’s a chump, and a pretty contemptible one. With his vile boss, he is a grinning sycophant who curries favor by pimping out his home. More often than not, disbelief is suspended in comedies, but there is a screaming lack of logic here. Sheldrake and Fran use Bud’s apartment twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays. That leaves Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and maybe Fridays for the other four men, unless they come into town on weekends with some frequency. But surely they spend some time at home with their wives. Nooners must be on the agendas of at least a few of the fellas, and it’s doubtful that Bud spends much time at all there, apart from sleeping after he’s changed the sheets. And as to the bed linens, I doubt that “Buddy Boy,” as the men call him, even has the spine to charge his bosses for the laundry bills. He’s a total patsy.

Spaghetti with sentimental sauce

Fran is not much better: simultaneously tough-talking and so vulnerable that she becomes suicidal when Sheldrake treats her like a whore, peeling $100 off his money clip for her Christmas present. The suicide attempt happens in the apartment, and she needs a few days to recover, during which Bud attends to her. She doesn’t have a home to go to, of course; she lives with her sister and brother-in-law. If she had her own home, the movie would fall apart. It’s all very forced. Bud wouldn’t get to make cute spaghetti using a tennis racket as a colander, and her brother-in-law wouldn’t burst in and bust Bud in the nose because he assumes Bud’s a lothario. So we get one man brutishly defending the (dubious) virtue of Fran, while his victim silently and nobly takes the punch rather than expose her as his boss’s mistress.

A snootful and an earful

Not that any of the women at Consolidated Life Insurance are any better or worse than Fran. In fact, Fran’s among the least promiscuous, it seems. Sheldrake is a rare transgression for her, we learn, from Kirkeby who says, “Would I like to get her on a slow elevator to China… but she just won’t give me a tumble, date-wise.” Fran’s affair with Sheldrake is, on her part, a true affair d’coeur, which she breaks off briefly— “it all begins to look so ugly,” she says to him— but then resumes it even after she’s told that he’s had other office flings. Quite a few, as it happens, including one with his angry blonde secretary, Miss Olsen (Edie Adams), who confronts Fran at the office Christmas party and gives her the timeline of Sheldrake’s mistresses. For this action, Sheldrake summarily fires her. In what may be the low point for the women portrayed in this movie, Miss Olsen replies, “You let me go four years ago, Jeff. Only you were cruel enough to make me sit out there and watch the new models pass by.” I’m sorry, but in four years, she couldn’t find another job? I wager he’d have given her a glowing review to get rid of her. Did she even try?

This film was, admittedly, made before Betty Friedan or Gloria Steinem or Germaine Greer were making inroads, but it’s not as if women were clueless, or that feminist ground hadn’t been broken. The precedents are many, but consider just two major films, both released 20 years earlier, in 1940: Ginger Rogers won an Oscar for playing a career woman who makes tough decisions about men and life in the drama Kitty Foyle, and Rosalind Russell took on the role of gutsy journalist Hildy Johnson, which had been written for a man, in the comedy His Girl Friday. 

Suicide attempt

All these things add up to Billy Wilder and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond trying to have it both ways− comic and tragic− and succeeding or, in my estimation, failing. They do convince the audience (most of it) that Lemmon and MacLaine’s characters are basically good and decent in an amoral world, but it’s a conclusion that flies in the face of the film’s action. However much Wilder/ Diamond try to manipulate the plot, the two main characters are as self-serving and amoral as any people in the film.